Rusting Giant in the Pines

and a lot of books and movies

It’s been hot as hell, but I’ve still been riding. Usually in the early morning.

Saturday, I managed to sneak in a ride and some Pine Barrens exploration before it became brutally hot. I went out to Franklin Parker Preserve for a longer ride, and while most of the birds were smart enough to stay out of the hot sun, I saw a Great Blue Heron, Pine Warblers, Red-Winged Blackbirds, Canada Geese, and a distant eagle or vulture. (I’m told there are Indigo Buntings at Black Run Preserve, so this weekend I’ll be out there.)

Not far from Franklin Parker, through the heart of the Pine Barrens—the town of Chatsworth, where the Blue Comet train once stopped, where Buzby’s General Store has been revived, the home of Hot Diggity Dog—there’s an old water tower accessible only by rutted and humped sand roads. I crawled the Outback around the washouts with the bike on the back, and made it to the tower. The site is where the Central Jersey Railroad once ran, but the tower itself is supposedly related to a foundry that’s since been demolished, except for a cellar hole hidden in the sand. It’s a lonely and eerie site lost between two well-traveled roads. One entrance is barred by buried earth mover tires, but if you’re careful and it’s not too muddy, a sand road off of Chatsworth-Barnegat Road will get you in. There’s a lot of trash and debris, so take care and mind your tires.

I didn’t bring the good camera or stop to photograph the birds. The humidity from the brief rain made the bike ride a tough one, and the water is so low at Parker that a birder I chatted with said that he’s unsure that the usual shore bird migration will stop there for long. I’ll be in Cape May soon, and I think I’ll visit the birder haunts early in the morning, to see what I can see. I may even bring a bike.

What I did photograph recently was a Tiger Bee Fly, a parasitic fly that lays its eggs in Carpenter Bee nests. This one landed on a towel by our pool. I love the transparent spots on the wings; at first, I thought it was a moth with ragged wings!

I identified it with Seek, an app that uses photographs from your phone. It can be very vague unless it has a good match, but it can be very helpful in identifying insects and plants.

Thank you all for the wishes for a quick recovery from my crash earlier this month. I’m nearly as good as new, unless I sneeze or cough. Then I remember that I bruised or hairline fractured a rib. I swam a thousand yards in the pool, I’ve biked dozens of miles, and I’m back lifting at the gym, so it’s mostly healed.

Here’s the eroded drop that I crashed riding, before and after repair.

Eroded and repaired

And because I couldn’t get Redd Foxx out of my head, here’s my favorite comedy album cover, and a clip of Foxx in his later years, expounding the virtues of goof hygiene.

If Redd isn’t to your taste, here are a few good reads from the past week or so:

A New York Story

True believers and mass movements

Waxwing lanterns

Dis/connection

Bookwise, Here are some recent reads that I’ve enjoyed:

Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. A future-now where prisoners fight to the death on reality TV, a vision of the police state that calls itself the only free nation.

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz. In fragments, like Sappho, a story of liberation at the turn of the century.

Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi. Another great YA fantasy in the same realm as Pet. Both explore resistance and the burden we place on the young when we expect them to fix our mistakes, and many other things. Great reads.

Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, by Elon Green. I’m not much into true crime, but this focuses on the victims, and is set in the gay bar scene of Manhattan where my uncle managed several bars, and the Pine Barrens.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart. Another tough yet sparkling coming of age in Glasgow tale from Stuart, it is gripping, heartbreaking, and hopeful.

Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, by Oliver Sacks. He is one of my favorite writers and this last collection is a gem.

I’m currently reading the heroic fantasy classic Legend by David Gemmell, Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak, and the lesbian classic Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, and enjoying them all. I also added Word Perfect by Susie Dent to my “read a bit a day” pile, which also includes The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay, Metamorphoses by Ovid, translated by Stephanie McCarter, and The Complete Poems of Jim Harrison, volume 2.

Movies…

Robot Dreams was nominated for Best Animated Feature last year, and it is a wonderful story of making friends, losing them, and making new ones. I also read the book, and the movie is better. This made me want to watch Castle in the Sky again, and I really enjoyed it. One of the often overlooked Studio Ghibli films, it holds up very well.

I also finally watched Tank Girl and it also holds up surprisingly well thirty years later. A goofier apocalypse, but never a boring one. Lori Petty, Naomi Watts, and Malcolm McDowell make it a blast. One that isn’t worth seeing if you missed it is Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which is the final nail in the coffin of the beloved characters. It had a few moments, but Joe Dante was not given any freedom to give them life, and the short bits in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? remain the last time they were ever successfully revived.

I also watched Cool World, which was Ralph Bakshi’s answer to WFRR?, essentially a two hour mess of “what if you could fuck cartoons and it somehow broke the fabric of space-time?” It certainly has its moments of bizarre, Krazy & Ignatz-style chaos, and Kim Basinger and Gabriel Byrne have a lot of fun with their characters. What stunned me most was how incredibly terrible Brad Pitt was back then. He’s gotten a bit better, but this was right after his abs got everyone twitterpated in Thelma and Louise, and before any acting lessons.¹ Cool World has an amazing soundtrack, and some of the set pieces are a lot of fun, but many scenes are excruciating.

Sticking with animation, The Imaginary is an interesting new film about the life of imaginary friends. It’s little light, but can be spooky and beautiful. You can watch it on NetFlix. Also on NetFlix is Nimona, which was a great fantasy that takes a lot of risks and is a lot of fun. Based on a graphic novel by ND Stevenson, the book is also worth your time.

Not animated, but lots of fun, is Godzilla: Minus One, which takes us back to the origin of the king of the monsters. Like the first 1954 film Gojira with a big budget, and a script that cribs a lot from Jaws, it’s the most realistic kaiju monster flick imaginable. As awesome as this incarnation of Godzilla is to watch, the people aren’t just there to be stomped on, and how they deal with the monster is the real story.

1. He’s twenty times more wooden than he was in Seven, and in that movie, you could believe that Gwyneth Paltrow’s character cut her own head off rather than remain married to him.